Mikal Hameed is a Brooklyn-based artist and designer who is constantly finding new corners of America's creative culture to explore. After starting out in music and theater, he shifted his efforts to visual arts and production design, all of which inform his latest efforts as a craftsman and maker.
As a designer (Mikal) and artist (M11X), he calls on us to forget our individualized nature and relationship with our headphones and demands that we start to share our music as it was meant to be: unplugged from our ears and free. M11X's manifesto blends the iconic image of the boombox and alters the platform to which music is brought to the masses. Mikal's personal relationship to the early '80s and boomboxes creates a strong foundation from which he explores through collaboration with traditional art mediums."By toying with the power of music and endless design possibilities, I can bring beats, rhythm, and life into paintings, furniture, and mixed media sculpture." M11X
I recently came across his "Eames Hotrod Boombox"—a refurbished and reimagined Eames lounge chair—at Brooklyn's Dijital Fix and I was fascinated by the notion of "remixing" an iconic design object, especially since it incorporated another vintage reference point in the turntable. Meanwhile, the allusion to the boombox is itself a reference to mixing and sampling music, and it so happens that the "Eames Hotrod Boombox" was featured as the album art for a compilation album called Verve Remixed 4. Although the project dates back to 2008, the video is certainly worth a minute of your time; New York-based readers can see it in person at Dijital Fix in Williamsburg, just a couple short blocks from the Bedford Avenue stop on the L.
After a short round of e-mail tag with David Auerbach of Dijital Fix, I managed to get in touch with Mikal for a quick Q&A in anticipation of his forthcoming exhibition, "Rebaroque," which is set to open in New York next week.
